Norton Anti-Virus Wrongly Flags Facebook As Phishing Site

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Symantec issued an update to its Norton anti-virus software that
mistakenly flagged Facebook as a phishing website.

The problems, found in updated versions of Norton Internet
Security and Norton Anti-Virus, was brought to Symantec's
attention Wednesday (Oct. 12) on a company
message board that saw customers sounding off about their
inability to access the social network because Symantec had
flagged it as a fraudulent Web page.

Lighting up the message board were posts titled, "Why is Norton
blocking my Facebook access as a 'phishing site,'" and "Norton is
blocking my Facebook … VERY annoying. Any help?"

The issue affected customers using Mozilla Firefox, Internet
Explorer 9, Apple Safari and Google Chrome. Though the update cut
off Norton customers from Facebook, the outage was only
temporary; Symantec resolved the issue "within hours," The
Register
reported.

"From the looks of support forum postings, affected users were
left dazed and confused rather than seriously inconvenienced or
aggrieved by the screw-up," The Register wrote.

Symantec urged Norton Internet Security customers affected by the
slip-up to run LiveUpdate, which will automatically fix the
situation and remove the "fraudulent" tag from Facebook.

Anti-virus software updates that erroneously mark certain
websites as malware are not uncommon; just a few weeks ago,
Microsoft's security tools accidentally
erased Google Chrome from 3,000 Windows machines after
flagging it as dangerous.